Building Performance Consultancy (over 300 employees)
Awarded to the consultancy that has demonstrated an outstanding contribution to the delivery of buildings that have high levels of measured building performance and user satisfaction throughout their operating life.
Winner: BuroHappold Engineering
BuroHappold Engineering’s commitment to – and sharing of – research helped it secure this prestigious award. The judges said it was ‘a key differentiator’, along with its use of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) for continuous improvement.
BuroHappold shares its expertise as a delivery partner for the Design for Performance (DfP) initiative, while its global Building Performance Group holds regular events to share best practice internally and its ‘Hackademy’ prepares engineers to make best use of the data generated by BIM technologies.
An example of BuroHappold’s POE work is the partnership with Newcastle University Urban Sciences Building, where all open-access and real-time data from the BMS has been embedded into the BIM model hosted online, enabling it to be used as a ‘living lab’ for research and FM.
The engineering practice also showed how it uses a variety of methods to promote strong collaboration between its staff, project teams and clients, including stakeholder engagement, user surveys, bespoke frameworks and performance targets. For its refurbishment of University College London’s (UCL’s) 22 Gordon Street, for example, it held a Lessons Learnt workshop attended by the design team, facilities management and end users.
Having declared a Climate Emergency, BuroHappold launched the Engineers Declare website, which now has more than 200 organisations committing to collaborate to deliver a net-zero carbon built environment. The judges were also impressed by the consultancy’s commitment to making its own premises operationally net zero by 2020/21.
A founding member of the CIBSE Health & Wellbeing Working Group, BuroHappold has also partnered with the British Red Cross, UCL and Lendlease to produce a toolkit for identifying and reducing loneliness at work.
Such a culture of investment in R&D and pushing the sustainability agenda should, said the judges, ‘be an example of excellent practice to all’.
Shortlist
Atkins
Cundall